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Attachment and Attachment Based Therapy
Attachment and Attachment Based Therapy
Attachment and Attachment Based Therapy
Chris Purnell
Published In
Attachment and Human Survival
Edited by M.Green and S.Scholes
Karnac Books 2004
June was becoming increasingly desperate to get through the checkout and
get home. Her two year old son, Adam, sitting in the front of her supermarket
trolley, was tired and irritable. He screamed in frustration as he struggled to
free himself from the trolley seat, and held out his arms towards his mother
demanding to be picked up.
There was little that she felt able to do to pacify him as struggled to pack her
shopping into bags. She turned and smiled apologetically to the woman
behind her in the queue in response to the disapproving gaze that was
focused upon Adam. A man standing behind the woman visibly winced, his
nerves jangling, as Adam let out another piercing shriek. June thrust payment
for her shopping in the direction of the cashier with one hand as reached
towards her son with the other in a further attempt to calm him. The cashier
smiled sympathetically as she gave June the change for her shopping.
Thankfully, June put the money into her purse and wheeled the trolley out of
the shop. Immediately she stopped and picked Adam, still screaming, out of
his seat and held him. For a few moments he continued to scream as she
spoke gently into his ear and held him to her, then he began to calm as the
physical closeness and her words reached him through his protest. His crying
reduced to a whimper as he snuggled against her, feeling reassured and
comforted by the physical contact.
Within a further few moments Adam had stopped crying altogether, and only
the occasional shudder of his body gave any evidence of his previous
distress. June felt herself begin to calm as Adam settled. She sat down on a
seat outside the shop and continued to simply hold him as he drifted off into
sleep, and then gently carried him in one arm, whilst using the other to push
the trolley toward her car in preparation for their journey home.
Every reader of the above story about June and Adam will be able to relate to
and locate oneself in it in some way. It is a story about Attachment, and this is
something that is important to us all. The need for human beings to be
attached to someone who can provide them with safety and reassurance
when they are frightened, anxious or tired was first talked about by John
Bowlby, the originator of Attachment Theory.
Bowlby and others have contributed much to our understanding of the ways in
which we form Attachments, and the consequences of Attachment
experiences for our emotional development. Importantly, we seek safety and
security throughout our lives, and the way in which we are able to obtain
these conditions shapes our self-understanding and our relationships with
others. In this chapter, we will review the variety of Attachment patterns that
Much has been learned about adult Attachment through the work of Mary
Main, who developed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). What Mains
research tells us is that for adults, Attachment experiences remain with us,
and persist at the level of mental representations. (By this we mean the way in
which attachment experiences have become registered in the mind).
Furthermore, behaviours that relate to internal working models of attachment
in children as described by Bowlby and Ainsworth, become increasingly
complex and representational in the progression towards adulthood. (Main
1991)
The AAI is a method of evaluating attachment patterns through scoring the
unconscious responses of adults to interview questions about their childhood.
What the method demonstrates very clearly is that it is not traumatic or
difficult relationships or events in themselves during childhood that dictate
anxious Attachment patterns in adults, but rather the manner in which those
experiences have been internalised as memories and states of mind.
Adults who are judged to be Secure are those who are able to give a
structured and coherent account of their childhood, and who are able to speak
about traumatic events in such a way as to demonstrate an ability to reflect
upon them and put them into perspective. It is as though the ways in which
these adults were responded to when they themselves were children,
provided emotional protection from the worst of their childhood traumas and
this contributed to their capacity to develop secure attachment relationships.
Adults with anxious Attachment patterns, on the other hand, are less able to
narrate their childhood story in a coherent fashion. Using the AAI
classifications, distinctive patterns emerge.
1. Dismissing. In this instance, in giving accounts of their childhood,
adults minimise the relevance or importance of childhood experience;
sometimes they claim to remember very little about the events of their
childhood, or recount those events as normal. In some instances, the
accounts that are given by Dismissing adults will be excessively brief, or they
might contain idealisations, contradictions or unsupported statements. In the
case of our supermarket scenario, it is very likely that the woman with the
disapproving attitude toward Adam would prove to be Dismissing if she
participated in the AAI.
2 Pre-occupied. Here, their accounts become very entangled and
incoherent grammatically. Such adults are unable to bring their accounts of
Attachment-based Therapy
The impact of Attachment experiences persist from childhood into adult life.
However, whilst the Internal Working Models that are formed as a result of
these experiences become more ingrained over time, they are open to
revision and change in the light of later experiences. This was something that
Reacts by trying to control own Re-establishes the distances needed for the
anxious, clinging behaviour in order placate dismiss relationship to feel less threatening and
in order to save the relationship anxiety provoking
withdraw blame
Figure 1
References
Fonagy, P, Steele, M., Steele, H., & Target, M. (1997) Reflective Functioning
Manual, Version 4. Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London
Miller, A. (1989) Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Societys Betrayal of the Child
Pluto Press: London
van der Kolk, B.A., van der Hart, O., & Marmar, C.R (1996) Dissociation
and Information Processing in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Traumatic
Stress.
Editors: van der Kolk, McFarlane & Weisaeth
Guilford Press: New York London